Tuesday, February 14, 2017

A fascinating
aspect of the rise of Donald Trump in American politics has been a rebirth in
discussions about fascism, racism, authoritarian politics, enfeebled democracy,
propaganda, and similar themes.While
much of the conversation is rather thin on substance, the need to explore these
possibilities is, in my view, both relevant and highly significant.

Within Internet
blog posts and discussion threads the warning offered in “Godwin’s Law,” penned
by attorney and writer Mike Goodwin, suggests that “"As
an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving
Hitler approaches 1.”The strong implication
is that “if you
mention Adolf Hitler or Nazis within a discussion thread, you’ve automatically
ended whatever discussion you were taking part in.”

Be that as it may, the two ugly characters now under consideration exhibit some notable features in common.At present I’m reading Ian Kershaw’s
excellent book Hitler: A Biography.Some of the parallels are striking.Here is a preliminary list of features that
caught my eye.

Both men:

1.Preferred the big picture and its vivid, propagandistic aspects;

2.Relished speaking to large gatherings of enthusiastic admirers;

3.Emphasized ruthless, hard-nosed strategies and tactics that could lead
to "winning;"

4.Had few if any close friends;

5.Disliked detailed meetings, briefings and matters of day-to-day
governance (which they left to subordinates);

6Tended to form alliances with people (mainly men) who were, if anything
just as emotionally fringy as they themselves;

7.Usually regarded women as beguiling ornaments;

7.Often saw conflict -- including
international conflict – as first and foremost a matter of settling scores;

8. Quickly eliminated anyone who stood in
their way;

9.Emphasized the urgent need to
recover the lost glory of a nation's earlier times;

10.Showed little if any empathy for the suffering of everyday people;

11.Relied upon a particular, favored right wing propagandist even for the
most crucial matters of policy making;

11.Always had a virulent race card, xenophobic rhetoric and ideas of fear,
terror and hatred ready at hand;

11.Were basically narcissistic autocrats in their relationships with
others, seeking to foster a culture of great “leader" around them to stoke
a voracious but insecure ego;

Friday, November 11, 2016

Why I've Unplugged from DirecTV

Although long in the brewing,
today Gail and I finally pulled the plug on DirecTV altogether. The main reason is that cable news coverage
in general and that of election 2016 in particular has deteriorated to a point that
it has become literally unwatchable. Reporters
and pundits, especially those on NBC, MSNBC and CNN who seemed somewhat
credible in earlier times have now become happy talk apologists for corporate
power and willing shills for Donald Trump, despite their well-rehearsed posturing
as thoughtful, critical journalists.
Their knee jerk maneuver is to hold high the banner of “both sides do it”
false equivalency, giving cover to each and every lie, misdeed and failing of
public figures, encouraging viewers to abandon the idea that underlying truths
might be discovered with a little more searching, attention to evidence and
reasonable conversation. This media
posture has become more obvious, less credible with each passing day. TV talking heads now go miles out of their way to avoid asking the most important, most troubling questions of the political figures they interview. Frankly, we’re done with this ongoing dodge.

While the particulars here
are too numerous to list, three stand out as patterns too often repeated to be
mere glitches in programming. One was
the preference for showing – often for hours on end – the empty podium where
Trumpy was expected to speak rather than telecast even a small segment of
speeches by Bernie Sanders and other candidates running for office. By some estimates the value of free TV
coverage for our now Confidence Man Elect eventually totaled $2 billion – a
lavish gift from networks supposedly licensed to serve the public interest.

Another telltale sign was the
utterly negligible amount of time devoted to substantive issues in the
presidential campaign broadcast by nightly news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC. According to the Tyndall Report, an
organization that has tracked network news coverage for decades, the total for months
from January through October came to 32 minutes total. Even more astonishing, no attention at all was given to what is
clearly the most crucial issue facing the nation and Planet Earth: climate
crash (often politely called “climate change”).
Not ONE minute. Pathetic.

Finally, I’d note the glaring
lack of diversity among the voices and perspectives of those asked to speak
even on the paltry range of issues, rumors and scandals that now fill the screen 24 hours a day. With a little work, the cable channels' election campaign coverage might
have found any number of articulate people from across the broader range of
American opinion – women from different points on the economic spectrum, African
Americans, Muslims, Latinos, millennials, blue collar workers, farmers, leaders
in small business, climate activists, Native Americans, techies, labor union
officials, notable social scientists, etc. Instead what we were invited to hear was very short
list of talkers – the usual suspects, most of them white – comprised of “conservative” blowhards,
Democratic “strategists,” Bush administration retreads, and a stable of amiable
dimwits invited to try to get a word in edgewise over the obnoxious shouting of
Chris Matthews.

While I regret to say it,
particularly annoying to me in recent months has been the once engaging
presence of always chipper, always bubbly, compulsively enthusiastic Rachel
Maddow. Yes, the content of her evening
show is often solid in its history and analysis. But the mood in which she probes the
disasters unfolding these days often seems simply fatuous. “We’ve got a great show tonight!” she
exclaims as the litany of horrors unfolds. Hey, what a fabulous spectacle American public life has become! Golly Gee! It’s also obvious that some topics are
strangely off limits for Maddow’s intelligent probing, for example the syrupy right
wing propaganda dished up each day by of her officemates in the Comcast office
suites. While it may be unfair, it
occurs to me that Rachel and her colleague Chris Hayes are just too nice as
people to seriously confront the ghoulish, destructive forces now looming in
the U.S.A., global economy and biosphere.

Fortunately, there are fine
alternatives: reading books, following serious websites, pulling down video
news clips from the Net, talking with family and friends over dinner. It turns out that local TV news is readily
available to us via our (slow rural) Wi-fi.
And, hell, I’d pretty much given up on watching pro football anyway, acknowledging what I know now about long term health problems that confront NFL
players.

Hence we’ll spend some of the
$90+ a month satellite bill to support
intelligent podcasts -- The Majority Report, Professional Left, Radio Ecoshock, and Best of the Left along with other good programs and causes.
Most of all we’ll be relieved of the agony of trying to pretend that cable and satellite TV offer a serious, reliable source of news and commentary about the world in
which we live.

Friday, July 15, 2016

[A
talk given at the Conference on Politics without Illusion, Revolution Without
Violence, International Jacques Ellul Society, Berkeley July 6, 2016]

Today
we often hear news that someone has been “radicalized on the Internet.” Well, I was radicalized in Berkeley during the
Sixties.

My
comments today are the reflections of one who graduated from The University of
California 50 years ago.The focusing
lens for my remarks is Jacques Ellul’s work The Political Illusion.

As I
prepared this talk, I thought, well, I certainly must read the book again and
compare my response now to what I could remember about my impressions back
then.I went to my library was pleased
to find the very copy of The Political Illusion I’d read in summer of
1967.It was filled with extensive
marginal notes, ones that revealed what I was thinking as I struggled with
Ellul’s unsettling challenge.

At the
time I was living in Washington D.C. -- a long haired Bay Area hippie, U.C.
political science grad student, anti-Vietnam war demonstrator, frequent
presence at psychedelic rock concerts, and also a student intern in the
Pentagon working in the office of Army Chief of Information, i.e. Propaganda.Back then a profile of that kind was called
“heightening the contradictions.”

Going
through the pages of my old copy of The Political Illusion this spring, I was
interested to see that many of my jottings were written in the characteristic
dialect of the time.For example, in the
chapter on “The Necessary and The Ephemeral,” Ellul argues, “How can people
fail to see that liberty requires integration into a continuity, a genuine
basis in reality obtained in very different ways than through ‘information.’As radical as it may appear, I am not afraid
…to claim that a man who reads his paper every day is certainly not a free
person.”

Next
to that passage young Langdon had written:“Ellul is far out!”

Actually,
two of his earlier books published in the U.S.– The TechnologicalSociety and
Propaganda – had already made a deep impression on me.The Technological Society was ultimately the
work that paved the road from my study of conventional political theory to a
lifelong engagement with questions about technology and politics.More than anything else, Ellul’s writing
helped give me the courage to move beyond the pale progress talk that that
filled scholarly writings in the social sciences and humanities during that
period.

Reading
The Political Illusion now as well and reviewing my marginal notes, its clear
that the book was in its basic features fully in tune with the temper the
time.Among the general upheavals of
Berkeley in the Sixties werethe Civil
Rights movement, the Free Speech Movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, student
revolt, rise of the hippies with all the music, ideas and cultural trappings
involved, arrival of the Black Panthers, along with the early rumblings of the
ecology movement, feminist movement, movement of people with disabilities, as
well as surfacing of the LGBTQ community.

In
many ways questions posed in The Political Illusion were central to concerns of
that decade.The political crucible of
the New Left stoked widespread desire to explore and develop new modes of
politics, community and citizenship beyond the dreary formats of the two party
system and the deeply conflicted agendas of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great
Society’.In its basic themes, Ellul’s
book was definitely in the zone.

This
is not to say that the book was a favorite among new left activists.Other key writings of the period, C. Wright
Mills The Power Elite, Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and Paul Goodman’s
Growing Up Absurd attracted a much broader audience.My guess as to why The Political Illusion did
not “catch on,” as it were, was that it staunchly refused to offer simple
answers to the questions it posed and the criticisms it launched.Above all did not offer a clear radical or
utopian vision to help people of the time resolve the issues they faced or
believed they faced.The insistent flow
of Ellul’s book carries the reader in directions that are not easily packaged
as a program, a movement or a clear road map for building a better
society.Indeed, many of his arguments
strongly suggest that measures favored by young activists were not only bound
to fail, but actually mirror the very evils they were railing against.In that sense, The Political Illusion was
perhaps more radical in its understanding of politics and society than radicals
of the day could handle.

For
example, a common feature of student uprisings on college campuses at the time
was to seek the validation of television in the struggles of the day.“The whole world is watching” was a common
chant and, in fact, demonstrators in Sproul Plaza would often leave the day’s
battle with campus cops and administrators to go back to their apartments and
watch themselves on TV.Using the media
to spread images of protest would, many of us believed, would alter people to
the problems at hand and move public opinion in favorable directions.And there was always “Hey, there I am on the
screen!” response, a sure sign that one’s own role was highly significant.Of course, a key argument in Elull’s book is
that action that seeks confirmation in information systems or in waves of
public opinion is futile to its core and tends simply to reinforce patterns of
state power, a lesson perhaps even more painfully evident today than in the
Sixties.

Looking
back on the evidence from my own jottings, I am reminded that despite its
relative lack of significance as a text for the student movement, The Political
Illusion was significant within another domain of my political education .Much of the substance of the discussion is
Ellul’s commentary on twentieth century European and American social science,
the very stuff I was studying in my seminars and preparation for doctoral
qualifying exams.It happens that Ellul
had closely followed the prominent works in sociology, political science,
psychology, communications studies, and the like.But what he took away from the various
theories and empirical findings was usually far removed from what the authors
intended.

Much
social scientific research in the post World War II decades sought to show how
the volatilities of mass society and the excesses of fascism and communism that
had erupted earlier in the century, could now be avoided, replaced by
reasonable, well-grounded forms of democratic politics and government.Equipped with new knowledge and new
technique, modern institutions would produce wonders of stability, rationality,
and responsiveness.That was the
prevailing view.

Without
distorting the conceptual or empirical foundations ofstudies in this genre, Ellul argues that a
deeper understanding of the classics twentieth century social science
revealsvarieties of domination,
oppression and disconnection from reality that emerge within the newly
refurbished institutions of political society.In much the same way that Marx claimed to have turned “Hegel on his
head,” Ellul takes the corpus of mid twentieth century social science research
and turns it on its head, revealing not the realm of enlightenment and progress
its writers hoped to reveal, but a kind of twilight zone in which benighted
souls wander helplessly in search of meaning, happiness and security.

In
political science at that the time a key quest was to shed light on pluralist
forms modern democracy, ones based upon economic, social and cultural interest
groups engaged in the push and pull of electoral outcomes and intricate
negotiations of policy shaping.Distinctly American versions of the story, the Yale School of political
science for example, welcomed the structures and dynamics of late twentieth
century political society as the maturation of democracy, an accomplishment
enriched by supportive environs of electronic media, social psychology, public
relations, methods of opinion polling, and improved practices in public
administration.

Within
the lively interactions of key interest groups and voting blocks in political
pluralism, conflict would happen in ways that produced sensible accommodation
achieved through graduated incrementalism.With increasingly thorougy penetration of society by radio and
television, there would arise a public much better informed about public
affairs.

And
within legislatures and bureaucracies leaven by the refined methods of social
science, intelligent, well-balanced policy outcomes were assured.

For
many of us studying politics and sociology during the 1960s this tidy picture
of political pluralism was notable for what it left out.At the top of our list of qualms was the
almost total absence of any role for citizenship in the various models of
democracy widely heralded as cutting edge political science.“Doesn’t democracy have to do with
self-governance?” we asked.Where in
this picture are citizen participation and genuine political freedom?

While
some of our faculty mentors found such questions interesting, a many of them
were outraged at their students effrontery.“Don’t you understand?” they would say.“The well developed patterns of structure and process we’ve described
are what mature, representative democracy is all about.”

Nevertheless,
among a good number of undergrad and grad students, the feeling grew that the
pungent criticisms ofStudents for a
Democratic Society about participatory democracy and social justice were more
to the point.

What
kind of democracy is it that excludes the vital, authentic unscripted political
activity of everyday people?

Entirely
similar concerns are central to Ellul’s critique of the social scientists.Within their rigor he detected a good amount
of mortis.Thus, his chapter on
“Participation” takes note of the ways in which leading social scientists of
the day were busily advocating principles quite far removed from genuine
democracy.One writer he finds
especially noteworthy is Seymour Martin Lipset, U.C. Berkeley sociologist,
author of the acclaimed book Political Man and a formidable presence on the
Berkeley campus during the Sixties.Ellul had obviously read the man’s work and summarizes its position
succinctly.

“There
still remains Seymour Martin Lipset’s theory; a group of associations of
oligarchic character contributes to maintaining democracy.For society to be democratic, it is not
necessary that the democratic rule be applied inside the organisms that
constitute it.Unions, for example,
represent the general interest of their members, who do better by joining unions
than by remaining at the mercy of industry) … all the associations combined
represent the divergent interests of all society; whereas every one of these
associations limits the individual’s freedom, it gives the leaders a much
greater real freedom.”

At
that point Ellul offers a wry comment.“This conception of democracy is really very touching, for it literally
reproduces the description of feudal society.”

(Oh, my!)

Throughout
ongoing series of commentaries in this vein, Ellul gently rips apart many of
the central ideas and arguments of the disciplines.To use a legal metaphor, his careful
rendering of social scientists’ own apologies for the condition of contemporary
democracy amounts to using the best evidence for the defense as the center of a
pungent argument for the prosecution.The thrust of Ellul’s position is that what are ostensibly open,
democratic institutions achieve a certain “political autonomy” that makes them
unrepresentative and unresponsive to the needs of the populace.His concept of “autonomy” here means that key
institutions of decision-making and administration have become things unto
themselves with internal dynamics of their own.Organizations both within and around the modern are tightly closed,
largely immune to any outside influence, especially that of lowly everyday
citizens.

How do
these matters look today?Even a quick
scan of our politics shows the substance of Ellul’s mid-century warnings
confirmed in at least two important ways.First, one can note the rigorous, data driven analyses of leading
political scientists.Deploying state of
the art quantitative methods, Martin Gillens and Benjamin Page have
demonstrated that the preferences of middle and low income people in the U.S.
have no influence in actual policy making.Zero, nada, zilch!What matters
in actual practice are only the preferences of the rich, the top socio-economic
layers of political society.That’s what
the surveys and analyses clearly demonstrate.As Gillens and Page summarize the implications of their massive study,
they carefully conclude: “America’s claims to being a democratic society are
seriously threatened.”(That about says
it.)

A
second way in which Ellul’s misgivings are now confirmed is evident in a number
of prominent political eruptions in the U.S. and Europe where grievances about
entrench oligarchy have become a common rallying cry.The Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 and
2012 -- as well as the revolt of the indignatos in Spain that preceded them –
were outbreaks of widespread unrest.More recently the themes of Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2016
have carried awareness of oligarchy and its grim consequences for jobs, income,
health care, education, pervasive inequality, and student debt onto center
stage of American politics.Senator
Sanders and his followers are convinced that the U.S. needs nothing less than
“a political revolution.”

In
somewhat similar respects, Donald Trump’s campaign, with all its bigotry,
racism and xenophobia, appeals to millions of people who feel the system isn’t
working for them.Reports on about
rapidly widening gaps of inequality in wealth and income in the U.S.A. are now
common in print, television and Internet political commentaries.Looking across the Atlantic, especially the
recent Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, one finds the widespread conviction
that distant, unresponsive, self-interested bureaucrats in Brussels have lost
touch with the needs and desires of everyday people and serve only the
interests of bankers and billionaires.As we observe these signs of an unhappy, restless populations, Ellul’s
diagnoses of the maladies modern political society seem not only confirmed, but
increasingly prophetic.

The
question in America right now is whether voters will again buy the threadbare
neoliberal canard that technological innovation and renewed economic growth
automatically will automatically generate a better way of life?Or will people rise in revolt as they realize
that promises of this kind are an illusion propagated by cloistered,
self-interested elites in Wall Street, Washington and Silicon Valley?As people ponder the economic, technological,
ideological, and political landscape that confronts them these days, a good
many of them are eager to say, “Frankly, we’re not buying it.”Much of the energy of politics in 2016
involves eruptions of this kind, a disturbing genie that politicians,
businessmen and figures in the corporate media now frantically struggle to put
back in the bottle.In the current
issue of the Atlantic, there is a long article by Jonathan Rauch lamenting the
fact that the people have lost faith in “the political class.”His essay along with a recent pieces by
Andrew Sullivan argue that today the problem is, sad to say, too much
democracy.

Looking
back to the 1960s, its possible that concerns in Ellul’s Political Illusion had
less affinity with the specific agendas of the New Left than with those of
another movement brewing at the time, one that eventually came to be known as
“the counter-culture.” Resonance of this kind can be found throughout the
book.A particularly revealing passage
is one in which Ellul’s argues that theory of economic alienation in Marx along
with remedies of economic democracy proposed on the Left no longer describe a
much deeper predicament that faces humanity.The economic, political, technological, informational order that
envelops social life infects people’s very souls and neutralizes their best
inclinations, their ability to think and act in meaningful ways.He writes, “Now the problem is for the powers
that be … to possess man internally, to organize fake appearances of liberty
resting on fundamental alienation, …to
fabricate false appearances of personality resting on integration and radical
massification.”

If
those words had been sung with suitable guitar feedback at Filmore Auditorium
concert in the late 1960s, we hippies might have exclaimed, “Oh wow, man,
that’s so heavy…”

It’s
true that Ellul does not go so far as to advocate out mass revolt against ways
of living built on materialism, consumerism, conformity and a hollow happiness,
but his book suggests that an uprising of that sort would be fully
justified.His
brief comments throughout the book, especially the chapter on “Man and
Democracy” offer the outlines of what an appropriate response would be.

He
insists that any aware, thoughtful person needs to step outside the stagnant
oppressive economic, political and technological milieu that claims one’s being
and to begin life anew.The problems in
modern politics are far deeper, more systematic than any obvious malfunctions
in governance.One must find ways to
reclaim and revitalize one’s basic humanity and restore the manifold promise of
social relationships.

When I
first read Ellul’s advice in the 1960s what stood out was what I took to be its
tone of stern, elevated, moral, individualism.Some of my marginal notes suggest that I found the book rather cloying,
something of a “downer.”More appealing
were the writings, songs, and festivals that held out the promise of a happy
community – “peace, love and good vibes” --Ecotopia perhaps.On my reading
of his words this spring, however, I noticed what the younger me had missed:
Ellul’s insistence that a genuinely democratic politics must engage the classic
question: How are we to live together?

Steps
toward that end, in his view, begin with the identification and open discussion
of what he calls “tensions” in society, ones that divide people one from
another and yet offer a opportunities for dialog, mutual respect and common
action. Instances
of significant tension from earlier periods of history include the tension
between church and state, between the bourgeoisie and laboring people.He implies that people today would have to
identify significant tensions of the present day, points of “differentiation”
and possible contention within the sphere of inter-personal relationships.Involved here would be concerted effort to
rescue the powers of language and reason from the toxic fog that surrounds thetechnological systems and mass media of the
modern state.

He
writes, “The common measures of what we have to say to one another and of what
makes communication possible, of what we jointly have to live for … must be
constantly rediscovered and recreated.”

“We
must understand that democracy is always infinitely precarious and mortally
endangered by every new progress.It
must be forever started again, rethought, reconstructed, begun again.”

What
Jacques Ellul offers, then, is a very stern challenge, one that sets a very
high bar for the attainment of anything remotely resembling a democratic way of
life.He is not especially optimistic
that his generation or any later ones will be able to realize it.Unlike the comforting nostrums offered by
politicians and social scientists, he depicts democracy as something extremely
difficult to attain, something often advertised but seldom realized, something
extremely fragile and always subject to abuse.

He
writes: “If man were left to himself -- his inclinations, his responsibilities,
his personal choices, on his own level, without systematic influence,
propaganda, “human relations,” group dynamics, obligatory information, directed
leisure, then slowly, humbly, modestly, democracy might perhaps be born.” To
which he adds: “But how newborn, how weak and fragile it would be!”

* * *
* * * * *

To
conclude, I want to add a brief historical coda.Our meeting takes place in the Heyns Room,
named for Roger Heyns, Chancellor of U.C. Berkeley during the late 1960s.He is perhaps best know for his opposition to
the peaceful occupation by students and towns people of People’s Park, a plot
of land south of campus, still there, that the university had slated for
development as an apartment complex.

At the
climax of a series of tumultuous events in May 1969 Governor Ronald Reagan
called in the police to remove the occupiers.At that moment Chancellor Heyns, bless his heart, abruptly skipped town,
leaving the protesters to face a barrage of shotgun bullets that killed one
man, blinded another and sent scores to the hospital.

The
demonstrations (in which I participated) ended with the first and only aerial
attack on a civilian population in American history, tear gas spread over the
campus by a helicopter.A photo of that
event appears on the Ellul Society’s web page for this meeting.

I
mention this story to indicate how even a place of scholarly gathering and
quiet reflection like this on can bear the stain of the kinds oppression that
Ellul’s book so eloquently describes, forms of power and violence that confront
us to this day.